


give me a minute

by luminousdoodle



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, Healing, Post-Hogwarts, Post-War, Romance, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-09
Updated: 2021-03-08
Packaged: 2021-03-15 13:47:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,313
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29934318
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luminousdoodle/pseuds/luminousdoodle
Summary: The war is over. They're mostly alive.My version of what happens after the Battle of Hogwarts, where they get to be messy, half-adults who fought a war and barely survived. Everyone stumbles in the direction of some long off happy ending.
Relationships: Harry Potter/Ginny Weasley, Hermione Granger & Harry Potter & Ron Weasley, Hermione Granger/Ron Weasley, Lavender Brown/Parvati Patil, Minor or Background Relationship(s)
Kudos: 8





	give me a minute

**Author's Note:**

> I've never found a post-war fic that's lined up with the way I saw things going. All I want is for these kids to get to have some fun and recover from the hellscape they've been through. So here we go...

The Burrow

_June 1998_

Ginerva Weasley is not a good daughter. She tells herself this every morning as she plaits her hair in the mirror. She rises before the sun, getting ready in the soft blue darkness, leaving as the first crimson strip peeks over the hill behind the Burrow. Another, better daughter might have been able to stand the house — its unusual silence, its aimless occupants, the constant visitors carrying platitudes and awards and condolences and important documents. Another daughter might have known how to break through Mrs. Weasley’s shellshock or sooth the rage that coiled inside Percy. She might have stayed to make cups of tea and put gentle, reassuring hands on strangers as they cried on the sofa. But Ginny Weasley has never been that kind of daughter. She never knew how to wear dresses in the way her mother liked, always found herself in trouble, never wrote home enough. She didn’t know what to say.

So she wakes before anyone else in the house and leaves. Carries her broom from the back shed and walks to the makeshift Quidditch pitch on the field behind the house. It’s spring still. The ground is soft as she pushes off. The mornings are cold enough for her to wear a sweatshirt, but when the sun does rise above the Burrow it feels sweet on her skin. She closes her eyes and floats on her broom. Her legs dangle. The breeze pushes her and she doesn’t mind. Did she know that sunshine could feel sweet before this? Before she believed that she would never feel the sun again? Yes, Ginny thinks. She remembers lying on the edge of the Black Lake with her head in Harry’s lap. She was sprouting wildflowers with her wand and twisting them into shapeless crowns. Harry was reading and tracing his finger across her upper arm. It’s a memory that seems to belong to a different person. But yes, the sun had felt sweet then.

On the third morning she pauses only briefly on the landing outside Ron’s room. She’s considered it _Harry and Ron’s room_ since the summer she was eleven and woke to find The Boy Who Lived eating breakfast in her kitchen. That summer she developed the habit of holding her breath as she passed the landing — a private ritual for good luck, at first hoping he would notice her, and later praying it would keep him safe.

Now Ginny breathes and pushes the door open. Ron is asleep, snoring lightly. Harry doesn’t stir, but she knows that he is awake. She knows this because she is awake. There are too many thoughts in her head to let her sleep. And if her mind is a hydra she knows that his is too. She knows this because in all the ways that matter they are alike. From the moment she locked eyes with him on Platform Nine and Three Quarters she could feel it. Harry Potter was lonely like her. 

Yes, she had brothers, a house full of them, in fact. But she was the youngest and the only girl. And a girl who always seemed to be getting the daughter part wrong somehow. She saw him and she knew — Harry Potter needed a friend. Not a friend like Ron, but the kind that knew about feeling alone on crowded train platforms.

She tosses his old Quidditch training shirt at him. It’s lived for over a year at the bottom of her school trunk, _Potter 07_ emblazoned across the back. He stirs and lifts his head towards the door.

“I need someone to play keeper,” she says.

**

They don’t talk. There’s no need. The motions of their warmup are muscle memory. They mount and push off without a word. It’s hard work after so long off of a broom, and even longer since Harry played keeper in one of their rotating games of scrimmage at the Burrow. By the time he is acclimatized to the twists and rhythms of the position the sun has risen fully and his shirt sticks lightly to the sweat on his back.

On the whole he’s a worse keeper than Ron, or Charlie even. But he can manage against the great Ginny Weasley because he knows her. He’s spent years of his life watching her in the air. He thinks he could pick her out anywhere, no matter the color of Quidditch robes, no matter how far away, just from the way she sits on her broom — lightly, like she weighs nothing, like her body floats on its own, like gravity doesn’t exist. He knows her favorite plays. He knows she favors her left, because she’s afraid to restrain the tendon in her right shoulder. 

A million years ago, in the Quidditch locker room, he rubbed his thumbs into the strained muscle as she winced. Her shirt, battered by mud and rain in practice, was off. It wasn’t the first time he had seen her in just a bra, no they lived too close, shared too many locker rooms for that. But it was the first time he touched her. They were friends then. Just friends who stayed close after practice and corrected each other’s plays.

He remembers that Ginny’s skin was hot and damp. Her rotor chuff felt strained beneath his fingers. She winced as he pressed.

“I was just hoping I could ignore it and it would go away on its own.” Her face was hot. She hated admitting error, weakness.

“A tactic I admire,” He remembers that in a moment of indulgence he ran his thumb over the muscle again, not pressing, because it felt good to touch her. She shivered beneath his fingers and he was fairly certain it had nothing to do with her pulled tendon. “But I don’t think it’s working out in this case.”

Harry blinks and the memory is gone. He blocks Ginny’s shot again.

“You’re hesitating before your right twists,” he tosses the quaffle back to her, “it makes you easy to spot.”

His captain voice is back. The one from the DA.

A flicker of annoyance passes over Ginny’s face. He can hear the words she might say because she’s said them in a million morning practices before. _I’m not hesitating, Potter. Why don’t you go back to looking for the snitch and let me do my job?_ But she stays quiet. She tosses the quaffle up, catches it, and zooms back to the other side of the pitch to run the drill again.

There is no hesitation. The quaffle soars through Harry’s fingers and into the ring. When he looks up Ginny is grinning. 

**

At the end of the first week, they pause mid-morning. The air is filled with fog so dense it’s almost rain. They position themselves so they can lean against the keeper’s goalposts and face each other. Knees bent, their feet come close to touching. Even in shoes, it feels close, intimate.

Ginny fishes a rumpled cigarette from her bag — the small white kind kids sold as contraband at Hogwarts —and as they share it she is careful where she puts her fingers and they never touch. Everyone she knows smokes now. Everyone she knows has sprung a collection of vices overnight.

“So, the Hollyhead Harpies?” Harry finally says as she’s passing him the cigarette. 

“I’m not going back. Mum knows. Well, she doesn’t _know_ know yet. But she understands. As much as anyone understands anything right now, I guess.” She inhales one more time and puts the moldering end of the cigarette out of its misery.

“The open try-outs are in July,” she continues, “But I’m not stupid, there are other teams. Puddlemere needs another chaser, and Oliver has mentioned it before.”

She runs her thumb around and around the edge of the mosquito bite on her knee. The skin is pink and tender, finally a scab she hasn’t picked over.

“Not for you.” Ginny looks up at the sound of his voice and sees Harry grinning at her, “You’re Harpies or bust.”

In the mornings, they run passes and shooting drills. Mostly Harry’s afternoons stop being his own. There are too many loose ends for the Ministry to put off asking its official questions any longer. Mrs. Weasley lets Kingsley and a few more familiar faces from the Auror’s office talk to Ron, Harry, and Hermione but never lets them stay into the evening. There will be a formal inquest later. Late summer or the fall, no one has quite decided yet. Mrs. Weasley knows she won’t be able to stop that, but she has some control now, in her kitchen as summer slips in. Each day at five sharp she sends the Minister of Magic packing and invites him to come back over for supper. No office talk allowed.

Ginny stays on the Quidditch pitch. She does stretches and balance exercises. She has no desire to hear a retelling of the past year of her life. For a few more weeks she would like to pretend that there is nothing in the world but Quidditch. She promises herself she will think about these things and likely talk about these things at some point — but not now. Harry returns for a few more scrimmages as the light turns golden then pink then lavender. Most days they dismount and lay in the grass and talk endlessly of Quidditch. Neither of them feel bad smiling when they’re only talking about Quidditch. 

Ginny gives her interview on the 24th of June. It’s a Wednesday. Harry leaves the house. The Quidditch pitch feels empty without her and the sound of the wind she makes as she rushes from one end to the other during sprints, so he heads for the kitchen garden. He lays amongst the tomato plants. On the parched earth, he is suddenly transported back to his summers spent lying amongst the landscaping on Privet Drive. Little Whinging feels like something that happened to another person, but it’s strange to think he will never live there again. He’ll live somewhere, Harry imagines, now that it’s over and he’s alive. 

He can hear the sound of voices, just too low for him to make out what they’re saying. He doesn’t have to see Ginny to know what she looks like right now — she’s sitting on the wooden stool in the kitchen. It’s where she sits when she wants to talk to her mother without getting in the way of the cooking. He’s seen here there a million times, slumped against the wall and talking to her mother about Hogwarts and the Harpies and the misfortune of sharing a bathroom with Ron. She won’t be slumping now, Harry is sure of it. She never slouches anymore, always seems to be holding herself very specifically, always aware of her edges and her hands. 

He and Ginny haven’t talked about it. Not since the night after the battle. He’d held her through that night and he told her all the things he had imagined telling her during the long nights in the tent. But the next morning they woke in stiff silence. Harry watched as Ginny plaited her long red hair in the wardrobe mirror. He’d never seen it so controlled before.

The day started hot and bright, but now thick clouds are gathering in the sky above Harry. He can feel the shift in the air, there’s a cool breeze cutting through the slats in the garden fence and through his thin t-shirt. At Hogwarts he loved the rain, it enveloped the castle and gave him the distinct feeling of being inside a snow globe. Now he thinks of the Burrow and its empty living room and silent radio and hopes the rain will hold off until after dinner.

By the time Ginny’s interview finishes, it’s clear that the rain will not hold off. It’s too dark for the afternoon and already fat, sporadic drops are staining the dirt around Harry. He rushes upright as he hears the kitchen door bang open and shut. He can just spot her whipping past the garden, snapping her arm guards on with violence.

On the Quidditch pitch the rain is coming down fully. They run a full version of afternoon practice. Harry doesn’t block a single shot. Even if the rain wasn’t streaming down his glasses, he couldn’t even get close to stopping something. Ginny shoots hard and fast, the quaffle ringing against the goalposts.

They hang their brooms up in the shed. They’re both soaking and he pulls the door shut to block out the pounding summer storm. Ginny pulls her goggles down and he can see that they’ve left rings around her eyes. She leans against the shed wall and lets out a sigh. For the first time in weeks, she lets her shoulders slouch.

“Do you know what you’re doing after all of this?” She doesn’t break eye contact with him when he meets her gaze.

Harry shakes his head. For the first time in his life, he has no idea what comes next. Even Hermione seems unable to piece together a way forward. At night, in Ron’s room, the three of them talk in circles. Hogwarts, the Ministry, Australia, London, no where, everywhere — there’s a pro and con for every situation they devise. They’re stuck to the boundaries of the Burrow. The idea of a wider world seems like it has slipped from his grasp.

“If it matters at all, for the record, I don’t think you owe them anything. Not a single second more.” She moves closer to him and it feels as if their bodies are going to crash into each other, gravity finally closing in. But she stops short and nods up at him.

Then she turns and opens the door to the rain. He follows her on the mud path back to the Burrow.


End file.
